“Beneath Christianism is a deep fear of the human mind”

For Santorum, as for Ratzinger, if your conscience says one thing, and the Pope says another, you obey the Pope, not your conscience. And for the Christianists, if your conscience or intelligence says one thing, and the Bible says another, you obey the Bible, not your conscience, and certainly not your intelligence. Because beneath Christianism is a deep fear of the human mind – as if they actually believe that reason is stronger than religion and therefore must be restrained. As if the human mind can will God out of existence.

And you wonder why all your readers are getting sick of you… the non-stop attacks on the Church are more than a little puerile and obnoxious. We get it, you hate Christ and His followers. Move along, nothing new to see here.

Robin Smith

He’s got a point though

Larry Barber

That was not an attack on the church, at best it was an attack on a very limited subset of the church, which you evidently equate with the church at large. This is not the case, the majority of Christians (at least the ones I know) are not what Sullivan and others call “Christianists”.

JPL

Actually, as a reader, I’m far more sick of the people who basically seem to come here just to put down and insult Tony.

Heath

Some of us “Christians” adore the words of Tony Jones & Co…

and certainly so only because the truth hurts and we are intellectual and spiritual -cutters.

Mary

A) Tony Jones didn’t write the article, just pointed it out. B) The article clarifies how and why theocons are unwavering in their belief that anyone but them is patently wrong- only they know the mind of God. C) ” this unique founding on the Judeo-Christian God”…. for goodness sake people …. do a little homework about your founding fathers … most of them were deists and were not the least bit interested in theocons’ version or any version of Christianity.

Daniel

Shorter: People who allow their religious beliefs to influence their intelligence are ignorant.

Really, it’s just another in the continuing saga of painting conservatives as ignorant. Quayle, Bush, Santorum et al. Doesn’t matter if they are or not, as long as the impression can be given.

“Because beneath Christianism is a deep fear of the human mind”

Baloney..for one. But it would seem with all this hype, that beneath this “rationalism” is a deep fear of religion.

Evelyn

This quote reminds me of a comment made by a person in a church discussion group about the Nicene Creed. He claimed that he didn’t want to investigate the creed because, if he did, he might find that he no longer believed in it and wouldn’t be able to come to church and say it. People become so emotionally bought into their religious institutions where they believe so many things on “faith” that their greatest fear is that there is nothing lying beneath this “faith”. Paradoxically, this fear amounts to a lack of faith in God (as Sullivan tries to point out).

The issue isn’t really between rationalism and religion because there is a lot of rationalism in religion. At religion’s base is the assumption that there is a God and everything else is an attempt to characterize that God and identify our relationship with that God. This is a form of rationalism.

I think the real issue is between an individual’s experience of God and a “collective” experience of God in the form of mandates dictated by a religious authority. Many people don’t have the time, experience, or motivation to think productively about their relationship with God so they expect the Pope or preacher to do it for them. You have to decide how much you are going to act on your own authority vs how much of your authority you give up to an outsider and which outside sources of authority (if any) you are going to trust.

Vasiti

from the beginning of this world…..the LORD made everything including humans (most likely to be the best creation of GOD) so no wonder religious beliefs can affect our intelligence.We are not ignorant but based our conscience on what we were based from…i.e…GOD made the human mind.

Nixon is Lord

Well, the human mind, my mind anyway, certainly did do away with god. Now I save time, money and trouble and get to sleep in on Sundays!